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himself to his coursework and earned a Bachelor of Arts at the University College on the larger island to the north, and when he returned, it was to claim the island scholarship and sweep her off her feet and onto a ship bound for England. But she had country values, and whereas most women would have considered the possibility of a life in England to be a lavish reward for simply waiting faithfully for a fiancé, he soon discovered that their arrival in England served only to stimulate the woman’s materialistic cravings, about which he had hitherto been ignorant. After he had rejected her and found a basement flat in Oxford where he felt he could live and work for the four remaining years of his scholarship, she hired a lawyer and began to harass him. Mercifully, and with help and advice from the University Overseas Office, he was able to quickly secure a divorce and put this marriage behind him. He speculated that perhaps some years hence, when she had finally grown up a little, she might well make some man a loyal and decent spouse, but this would be in the future and would be none of his business.
    As his former wife emerged from the bedroom, he looked from mother to daughter, and again he wondered how he could have miscalculated so disastrously. The place contained not a single book, and as the woman began to speak, he was once again reminded that her conversation never ascended above the banal: their daughter’s life at school, her new job as a cleaner at a local hospital, her friend the nurse who minded the girl when she worked the night shift. He had read about such people, but it didn’t seem fair that he should be connected to them. His former wife had, as always, prepared rice and peas and chicken for him, and he watched as she carefully spooned out his food onto a plate, and then she and the girl sat and stared as he ate, and he knew that this charade would end only when he handed over the slim brown envelope of money that they were expecting. Until then he forced himself to appear amicable, all the while stealing glances at the girl, who, when she opened her mouth, exposed teeth that had already been attacked by sugar.
    Sometime later he sat on the tube and stared at his reflection in the smudged mirror that was the glass, and he knew it was essential that he empty his mind of the events of the day. He had made a mistake and he was paying for it and that was all there was to it. Once he got off the tube, instead of going straight home, he made his way into a noisy pub next to the underground station and stood by the bar and began to order drinks. Once the landlord called time, and the pub began to let out, he wandered into a small park and sat alone on a damp bench with a slat missing. Monica needed help, he knew this, and in fact he had begun to worry about her before they had even moved to the south coast. It was not just the blank stare that perturbed him, for the truth was she had always displayed a tendency to lapse into these trances; what alarmed him the most was her ability to withdraw completely from him yet continue to function as though nothing were happening. It was clear that at such moments she wasn’t listening to him, and when she finally came back to herself, she seemed to have no understanding that she might have been behaving oddly. He knew that Monica couldn’t be happy, but how was he supposed to know what to do about it if she wasn’t prepared to talk to him? He sighed. Really, when all was said and done, this wasn’t the ideal moment for him to be dealing with this. Not now.
    By the time he was ready to stumble home he had no clue how late it was and no idea how his life could have taken such a depressing turn. He quietly pushed the key into the door of the bed-sitting-room, hoping that Monica would now be asleep. He eased the whining door shut until he heard the reassuring click of the Yale lock, and then he stepped on the back of first one shoe and then the other and silently